OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Indoor Positioning using Similarity-based Sequence and Dead Reckoning without Training
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

For the traditional fingerprinting-based positioning approach, it is essential to collect measurements at known locations as reference fingerprints during a training phase, which can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper proposes a novel approach to track a user in an indoor environment by integrating similarity-based sequence and dead reckoning. In particular, we represent the fingerprinting map as location sequences based on distance ranking of the APs (access points) whose positions are known. The fingerprint used for online positioning is represented by a ranked sequence of APs based on the measured Received Signal Strength (RSS), which is refereed to as RSS sequence in this paper. Embedded into a particle filter, we achieve the tracking of a mobile user by fusing the sequence-based similarity and dead reckoning. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed approach.
Musical Instrument Recognition Using Their Distinctive Characteristics in Artificial Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

In this study an Artificial Neural Network was trained to classify musical instruments, using audio samples transformed to the frequency domain. Different features of the sound, in both time and frequency domain, were analyzed and compared in relation to how much information that could be derived from that limited data. The study concluded that in comparison with the base experiment, that had an accuracy of 93.5%, using the attack only resulted in 80.2% and the initial 100 Hz in 64.2%.
On Timing Model Extraction and Hierarchical Statistical Timing Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we investigate the challenges to apply Statistical Static Timing Analysis (SSTA) in hierarchical design flow, where modules supplied by IP vendors are used to hide design details for IP protection and to reduce the complexity of design and verification. For the three basic circuit types, combinational, flip-flop-based and latch-controlled, we propose methods to extract timing models which contain interfacing as well as compressed internal constraints. Using these compact timing models the runtime of full-chip timing analysis can be reduced, while circuit details from IP vendors are not exposed. We also propose a method to reconstruct the correlation between modules during full-chip timing analysis. This correlation can not be incorporated into timing models because it depends on the layout of the corresponding modules in the chip. In addition, we investigate how to apply the extracted timing models with the reconstructed correlation to evaluate the performance of the complete design. Experiments demonstrate that using the extracted timing models and reconstructed correlation full-chip timing analysis can be several times faster than applying the flattened circuit directly, while the accuracy of statistical timing analysis is still well maintained.
Post-Route Alleviation of Dense Meander Segments in High-Performance Printed Circuit Boards
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2017
Year: 2017

Length-matching is an important technique to balance delays of bus signals in high-performance PCB routing. Existing routers, however, may generate dense meander segments with small distance. Signals propagating across these meander segments exhibit a speedup effect due to crosstalks between the segments of the same wire, thus leading to mismatch of arrival times even with the same physical wire length. In this paper, we propose a post-processing method to enlarge the width and the distance of meander segments and distribute them more evenly on the board so that the crosstalks can be reduced. In the proposed framework, we model the sharing combinations of available routing areas after removing dense meander segments from the initial routing, as well as the generation of relaxed meander segments and their groups in subareas. Thereafter, this model is transformed into an ILP problem and solved efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed method can extend the width and the distance of meander segments about two times even under very tight area constraints, so that the crosstalks and thus the speedup effect can be alleviated effectively in high-performance PCB designs.
Information Leakage Games
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

We consider a game-theoretic setting to model the interplay between attacker and defender in the context of information flow, and to reason about their optimal strategies. In contrast with standard game theory, in our games the utility of a mixed strategy is a convex function of the distribution on the defender's pure actions, rather than the expected value of their utilities. Nevertheless, the important properties of game theory, notably the existence of a Nash equilibrium, still hold for our (zero-sum) leakage games, and we provide algorithms to compute the corresponding optimal strategies. As typical in (simultaneous) game theory, the optimal strategy is usually mixed, i.e., probabilistic, for both the attacker and the defender. From the point of view of information flow, this was to be expected in the case of the defender, since it is well known that randomization at the level of the system design may help to reduce information leaks. Regarding the attacker, however, this seems the first work (w.r.t. the literature in information flow) proving formally that in certain cases the optimal attack strategy is necessarily probabilistic.
Winning on the Merits: The Joint Effects of Content and Style on Debate Outcomes
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of which side has the stronger arguments. We propose a predictive model of debate that estimates the effects of linguistic features and the latent persuasive strengths of different topics, as well as the interactions between the two. Using a dataset of 118 Oxford-style debates, our model's combination of content (as latent topics) and style (as linguistic features) allows us to predict audience-adjudicated winners with 74% accuracy, significantly outperforming linguistic features alone (66%). Our model finds that winning sides employ stronger arguments, and allows us to identify the linguistic features associated with strong or weak arguments.
Piggybacking on an Autonomous Hauler: Business Models Enabling a System-of-Systems Approach to Mapping an Underground Mine
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

With ever-increasing productivity targets in mining operations, there is a growing interest in mining automation. In future mines, remote-controlled and autonomous haulers will operate underground guided by LiDAR sensors. We envision reusing LiDAR measurements to maintain accurate mine maps that would contribute to both safety and productivity. Extrapolating from a pilot project on reliable wireless communication in Boliden's Kankberg mine, we propose establishing a system-of-systems (SoS) with LIDAR-equipped haulers and existing mapping solutions as constituent systems. SoS requirements engineering inevitably adds a political layer, as independent actors are stakeholders both on the system and SoS levels. We present four SoS scenarios representing different business models, discussing how development and operations could be distributed among Boliden and external stakeholders, e.g., the vehicle suppliers, the hauling company, and the developers of the mapping software. Based on eight key variation points, we compare the four scenarios from both technical and business perspectives. Finally, we validate our findings in a seminar with participants from the relevant stakeholders. We conclude that to determine which scenario is the most promising for Boliden, trade-offs regarding control, costs, risks, and innovation must be carefully evaluated.
Operational Semantics of Process Monitors
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

CSPe is a specification language for runtime monitors that can directly express concurrency in a bottom-up manner that composes the system from simpler, interacting components. It includes constructs to explicitly flag failures to the monitor, which unlike deadlocks and livelocks in conventional process algebras, propagate globally and aborts the whole system's execution. Although CSPe has a trace semantics along with an implementation demonstrating acceptable performance, it lacks an operational semantics. An operational semantics is not only more accessible than trace semantics but also indispensable for ensuring the correctness of the implementation. Furthermore, a process algebra like CSPe admits multiple denotational semantics appropriate for different purposes, and an operational semantics is the basis for justifying such semantics' integrity and relevance. In this paper, we develop an SOS-style operational semantics for CSPe, which properly accounts for explicit failures and will serve as a basis for further study of its properties, its optimization, and its use in runtime verification.
Layerwise Systematic Scan: Deep Boltzmann Machines and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

For Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, one of the greatest discrepancies between theory and system is the scan order - while most theoretical development on the mixing time analysis deals with random updates, real-world systems are implemented with systematic scans. We bridge this gap for models that exhibit a bipartite structure, including, most notably, the Restricted/Deep Boltzmann Machine. The de facto implementation for these models scans variables in a layerwise fashion. We show that the Gibbs sampler with a layerwise alternating scan order has its relaxation time (in terms of epochs) no larger than that of a random-update Gibbs sampler (in terms of variable updates). We also construct examples to show that this bound is asymptotically tight. Through standard inequalities, our result also implies a comparison on the mixing times.
Design of a Very Compact CNN Classifier for Online Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition Using DropWeight and Global Pooling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Currently, owing to the ubiquity of mobile devices, online handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) has become one of the suitable choice for feeding input to cell phones and tablet devices. Over the past few years, larger and deeper convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have extensively been employed for improving character recognition performance. However, its substantial storage requirement is a significant obstacle in deploying such networks into portable electronic devices. To circumvent this problem, we propose a novel technique called DropWeight for pruning redundant connections in the CNN architecture. It is revealed that the proposed method not only treats streamlined architectures such as AlexNet and VGGNet well but also exhibits remarkable performance for deep residual network and inception network. We also demonstrate that global pooling is a better choice for building very compact online HCCR systems. Experiments were performed on the ICDAR-2013 online HCCR competition dataset using our proposed network, and it is found that the proposed approach requires only 0.57 MB for storage, whereas state-of-the-art CNN-based methods require up to 135 MB; meanwhile the performance is decreased only by 0.91%.
Evaluating Rapid Application Development with Python for Heterogeneous Processor-based FPGAs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

As modern FPGAs evolve to include more het- erogeneous processing elements, such as ARM cores, it makes sense to consider these devices as processors first and FPGA accelerators second. As such, the conventional FPGA develop- ment environment must also adapt to support more software- like programming functionality. While high-level synthesis tools can help reduce FPGA development time, there still remains a large expertise gap in order to realize highly performing implementations. At a system-level the skill set necessary to integrate multiple custom IP hardware cores, interconnects, memory interfaces, and now heterogeneous processing elements is complex. Rather than drive FPGA development from the hardware up, we consider the impact of leveraging Python to ac- celerate application development. Python offers highly optimized libraries from an incredibly large developer community, yet is limited to the performance of the hardware system. In this work we evaluate the impact of using PYNQ, a Python development environment for application development on the Xilinx Zynq devices, the performance implications, and bottlenecks associated with it. We compare our results against existing C-based and hand-coded implementations to better understand if Python can be the glue that binds together software and hardware developers.
Exact Statistical Characterization of $2\times2$ Gram Matrices with Arbitrary Variance Profile
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper is concerned with the statistical properties of the Gram matrix $\mathbf{W}=\mathbf{H}\mathbf{H}^\dagger$, where $\mathbf{H}$ is a $2\times2$ complex central Gaussian matrix whose elements have arbitrary variances. With such arbitrary variance profile, this random matrix model fundamentally departs from classical Wishart models and presents a significant challenge as the classical analytical toolbox no longer directly applies. We derive new exact expressions for the distribution of $\mathbf{W}$ and that of its eigenvalues by means of an explicit parameterization of the group of unitary matrices. Our results yield remarkably simple expressions, which are further leveraged to study the outage data rate of a dual-antenna communication system under different variance profiles.
Discrete Event Simulation of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2017
Year: 2017

The article discusses issues related to the construction of the PRT network simulator and the simulation process: the elements of PRT network structure, their representation in the simulator, the simulation process itself, animation, and automation of the experiments. An example of a simulation environment Feniks is described, elaborated within the framework of the Eco-Mobility project.
View-invariant Gait Recognition through Genetic Template Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Template-based model-free approach provides by far the most successful solution to the gait recognition problem in literature. Recent work discusses how isolating the head and leg portion of the template increase the performance of a gait recognition system making it robust against covariates like clothing and carrying conditions. However, most involve a manual definition of the boundaries. The method we propose, the genetic template segmentation (GTS), employs the genetic algorithm to automate the boundary selection process. This method was tested on the GEI, GEnI and AEI templates. GEI seems to exhibit the best result when segmented with our approach. Experimental results depict that our approach significantly outperforms the existing implementations of view-invariant gait recognition.
Digital Signal Processing for Optical Communications and Networks I: Linear Compensation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

The achievable information rates of optical communication networks have been widely increased over the past four decades with the introduction and development of optical amplifiers, coherent detection, advanced modulation formats, and digital signal processing techniques. These developments promoted the revolution of optical communication systems and the growth of Internet, towards the direction of high-capacity and long-distance transmissions. The performance of long-haul high-capacity optical fiber communication systems is significantly degraded by transmission impairments, such as chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion, laser phase noise and Kerr fiber nonlinearities. With the entire capture of the amplitude and phase of the signals using coherent optical detection, the powerful compensation and effective mitigation of the transmission impairments can be implemented using the digital signal processing in electrical domain. This becomes one of the most promising techniques for next-generation optical communication networks to achieve a performance close to the Shannon capacity limit. This chapter will focus on the introduction and investigation of digital signal processing employed for channel impairments compensation based on the coherent detection of optical signals, to provide a roadmap for the design and implementation of realtime optical fiber communication systems.
Back to RGB: 3D tracking of hands and hand-object interactions based on short-baseline stereo
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present a novel solution to the problem of 3D tracking of the articulated motion of human hand(s), possibly in interaction with other objects. The vast majority of contemporary relevant work capitalizes on depth information provided by RGBD cameras. In this work, we show that accurate and efficient 3D hand tracking is possible, even for the case of RGB stereo. A straightforward approach for solving the problem based on such input would be to first recover depth and then apply a state of the art depth-based 3D hand tracking method. Unfortunately, this does not work well in practice because the stereo-based, dense 3D reconstruction of hands is far less accurate than the one obtained by RGBD cameras. Our approach bypasses 3D reconstruction and follows a completely different route: 3D hand tracking is formulated as an optimization problem whose solution is the hand configuration that maximizes the color consistency between the two views of the hand. We demonstrate the applicability of our method for real time tracking of a single hand, of a hand manipulating an object and of two interacting hands. The method has been evaluated quantitatively on standard datasets and in comparison to relevant, state of the art RGBD-based approaches. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed stereo-based method performs equally well to its RGBD-based competitors, and in some cases, it even outperforms them.
Proof Tree Preserving Interpolation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

Craig interpolation in SMT is difficult because, e. g., theory combination and integer cuts introduce mixed literals, i. e., literals containing local symbols from both input formulae. In this paper, we present a scheme to compute Craig interpolants in the presence of mixed literals. Contrary to existing approaches, this scheme neither limits the inferences done by the SMT solver, nor does it transform the proof tree before extracting interpolants. Our scheme works for the combination of uninterpreted functions and linear arithmetic but is extendable to other theories. The scheme is implemented in the interpolating SMT solver SMTInterpol.
GP-ILQG: Data-driven Robust Optimal Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

As we aim to control complex systems, use of a simulator in model-based reinforcement learning is becoming more common. However, it has been challenging to overcome the Reality Gap, which comes from nonlinear model bias and susceptibility to disturbance. To address these problems, we propose a novel algorithm that combines data-driven system identification approach (Gaussian Process) with a Differential-Dynamic-Programming-based robust optimal control method (Iterative Linear Quadratic Control). Our algorithm uses the simulator's model as the mean function for a Gaussian Process and learns only the difference between the simulator's prediction and actual observations, making it a natural hybrid of simulation and real-world observation. We show that our approach quickly corrects incorrect models, comes up with robust optimal controllers, and transfers its acquired model knowledge to new tasks efficiently.
Diseña, Fabrica y Programa Tu Propio Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

In this document we present DYOR, an educational robot that you can make at home or at class. The robot has been created by students at the Universitat Politécnica de València and me through their projects and masther thesis and it has been used in my subjects at the University so my students dessign, make and program their own robot with low-cost materials.
Distributed Statistical Machine Learning in Adversarial Settings: Byzantine Gradient Descent
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the problem of distributed statistical machine learning in adversarial settings, where some unknown and time-varying subset of working machines may be compromised and behave arbitrarily to prevent an accurate model from being learned. This setting captures the potential adversarial attacks faced by Federated Learning -- a modern machine learning paradigm that is proposed by Google researchers and has been intensively studied for ensuring user privacy. Formally, we focus on a distributed system consisting of a parameter server and $m$ working machines. Each working machine keeps $N/m$ data samples, where $N$ is the total number of samples. The goal is to collectively learn the underlying true model parameter of dimension $d$. In classical batch gradient descent methods, the gradients reported to the server by the working machines are aggregated via simple averaging, which is vulnerable to a single Byzantine failure. In this paper, we propose a Byzantine gradient descent method based on the geometric median of means of the gradients. We show that our method can tolerate $q \le (m-1)/2$ Byzantine failures, and the parameter estimate converges in $O(\log N)$ rounds with an estimation error of $\sqrt{d(2q+1)/N}$, hence approaching the optimal error rate $\sqrt{d/N}$ in the centralized and failure-free setting. The total computational complexity of our algorithm is of $O((Nd/m) \log N)$ at each working machine and $O(md + kd \log^3 N)$ at the central server, and the total communication cost is of $O(m d \log N)$. We further provide an application of our general results to the linear regression problem. A key challenge arises in the above problem is that Byzantine failures create arbitrary and unspecified dependency among the iterations and the aggregated gradients. We prove that the aggregated gradient converges uniformly to the true gradient function.
New quaternary sequences of even length with optimal auto-correlation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Sequences with low auto-correlation property have been applied in code-division multiple access communication systems, radar and cryptography. Using the inverse Gray mapping, a quaternary sequence of even length $N$ can be obtained from two binary sequences of the same length, which are called component sequences. In this paper, using interleaving method, we present several classes of component sequences from twin-prime sequences pairs or GMW sequences pairs given by Tang and Ding in 2010; two, three or four binary sequences defined by cyclotomic classes of order $4$. Hence we can obtain new classes of quaternary sequences, which are different from known ones, since known component sequences are constructed from a pair of binary sequences with optimal auto-correlation or Sidel'nikov sequences.